CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Knowledge Work and Gender Roles

IN ANY WORK THAT requires skill or confers status, men’s jobs and women’s jobs have been distinct and separate throughout all but the last few decades of history, in all cultures and civilizations. The belief that women’s jobs and women’s social status were always inferior to men’s—practically an article of faith today—is a half-truth at best. Rather, men competed with men, women with women. In knowledge work today, however, men and women increasingly do the same jobs and are competing and working collegially in the same arena.

This is still an experiment—though practically all developed countries (beginning, of course, with the United States) are engaged in it. For all anyone can know so far, the experiment may fail and be abandoned or sidelined after a few decades. I consider this unlikely, but it cannot be ruled out. After all, the experiment preceding it, the feminist movement that began in the early nineteenth century and saw “freedom for women” in their not having to work—its model being the “cultured, middle-class housewife”—is now widely (though by no means generally) considered to have been both a mistake and a failure.

Historically, women have always worked as hard as men. A farmer had to have a wife. And a woman on the farm had to have a husband. Neither could run a farm alone. The goldsmith or the shoemaker had to have a wife, and she had to have a goldsmith husband or shoemaker husband. Neither could run the craft shop alone. The store owner had to have a wife. And, conversely, no woman alone was likely to be able to run a store.

But, historically, men and women did the same work only when it was menial. Men and women both dug ditches, and they worked together. Men and women both picked cotton in the fields. But any work involving skill, and any work conferring social status or providing income above minimum subsistence, was segregated by sex. A “spinster” is a woman. Potters were always men.

In every primitive society studied by anthropologists, work requiring skill or giving social status is strictly separated by sex. In the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean—studied around the time of World War II by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942)—the men built boats, manned them, and fished; the women tilled the land and grew yams. And then the men turned over half their catch to the women, and women half their crop to the men.

Such sex segregation was still the rule in nineteenth-century Europe and America. The first of the new knowledge jobs was nursing, invented by Florence Nightingale in 1854, during the Crimean War. It was designed to be exclusively women’s work. After the typewriter became all-pervasive in the office, the job of secretary soon became a female one. From the beginning, telephone operators were women; telephone installers were men.

Indeed, until recently, “feminism” meant extending the separation of jobs by sex, all the way down to the menial work men and women traditionally had been doing together. From 1850 on, when agitation to limit women’s hours of industrial work first began, the thrust of traditional feminism was to enlarge the scope of occupations in which there was men’s work and women’s work, with each sphere clearly defined and limited to people of one sex only.

But knowledge is gender-neutral. Knowledge and knowledge jobs are equally accessible to both sexes.

As soon as there were a substantial number of knowledge jobs, women began to qualify for them, reach for them, move into them. The movement began in the last decades of the nineteenth century—teaching came first. It gathered momentum after World War I. In fact, the era of outstanding American women leaders is not today. In the 1930s and 1940s a galaxy of exceptional women bestrode the American stage. Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins in government and politics; Anna Rosenberg in personnel management and labor relations; half a dozen brilliant presidents of women’s colleges; Helen Taussig in medicine; Lillian Hellman and Clare Boothe Luce as playwrights; Dorothy Thompson in foreign affairs and journalism. In fact, Hillary Clinton is very much a throwback to this earlier generation.

The movement of women into the same kinds of knowledge work as men has become a flood since World War II, and a “cause” in the past twenty years. Conversely, men, in increasing numbers, are moving into what, for more than a century, had been the one exclusively female knowledge profession: nursing. Two-fifths of the nurse-anesthetists in the United States—all of them RNs—are now men.

The higher up the ladder we go in knowledge work, the more likely it is that men and women are doing the same work. Being a secretary in an American bank still means being a woman, but a vice president in the same bank may be a man or a woman. Increasingly, what an earlier generation of feminists saw as advancing the status and position of women—for example, prohibiting women from doing physically dangerous work—is now seen by feminists as discrimination against women, and possibly even as oppression of women.

Unless this movement fizzles out—or at least abates to where the “career woman” is again the exception she was half a century ago—it will have tremendous impact, and not only on workforces and careers. The greatest impact may be on the family.

Throughout the ages, all attempts to take children away from their mothers and to bring them up in collective institutions—as was done in Sparta in Greek antiquity—were deeply resented and bitterly fought by women. They saw such moves as depriving them of their rightful sphere of power, of influence, and of contribution. Now the demand for child-care centers, to look after children while their mothers work, is seen as crucial to women’s equality and as a woman’s “right.”

Throughout the ages, it was axiomatic that the first task of the adult woman was to hold the family together and take care of the children. And the first responsibility of the man was to support wife and children. Today’s feminism, especially in its radical form, fights as discrimination and as oppression woman’s role as “homemaker” and child-care provider. But at the same time, the “single mother” who does not need a man to support her children releases the father from responsibility for the family. What, then, will family mean tomorrow, if these trends persist? And what will this mean for community and for society?

This is all still quite speculative. But this development, well outside of anything that traditional economics, sociology, and political science ever considered to be within their purviews, may well be seen a century hence as the distinctive social innovation of the twentieth century. It is a reversal of all history and tradition.

In this century the workforce in the developed countries has shifted from manual workers doing and moving things—on the farm, in the factory, in the mines, in transportation—to knowledge work and services work. These are momentous shifts. But they are shifts in how we earn our living. The disappearance of sex roles in knowledge work profoundly affects how we live.

1994